Reading and Re-reading the Vasu-caritramu 1. All readers of classical Telugu know that Bhaṭṭumūrti’s Vasu-caritramu (VC) is one of the hardest books to read in the entire literary corpus, in some ways harder even than its closest rival in this respect, Kṛṣṇarāya’s Āmukta-mālyada, famous for its complicated, non-native syntax and strange metrical effects. Nearly every verse in the VC presents the reader or listener with a challenge. Many, probably most, are bitextual, śliṣṭa, often in ways atypical of earlier paronomastic practices in Sanskrit and Telugu. Typically, such verses have to be deciphered, preferably with the help of a good commentary such as Tanjanagaram Tevapperumallayya’s, which can be shown to go back to eighteenth-century predecessors and thus to embody one traditional way of reading. It takes time to make sense of such verses; also, understanding them on the level of primary denotation is only the beginning of a much longer process of exploring meaning, for each verse is embedded in a 1
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Transcript
Reading and Re-reading the Vasu-caritramu
1.
All readers of classical Telugu know that Bha umūrti’s ṭṭ Vasu-caritramu
(VC) is one of the hardest books to read in the entire literary corpus, in some
ways harder even than its closest rival in this respect, K arāya’s ṛṣṇ Āmukta-
mālyada, famous for its complicated, non-native syntax and strange metrical
effects. Nearly every verse in the VC presents the reader or listener with a
challenge. Many, probably most, are bitextual, śli aṣṭ , often in ways atypical of
earlier paronomastic practices in Sanskrit and Telugu. Typically, such verses
have to be deciphered, preferably with the help of a good commentary such as
Tanjanagaram Tevapperumallayya’s, which can be shown to go back to
eighteenth-century predecessors and thus to embody one traditional way of
reading. It takes time to make sense of such verses; also, understanding them on
the level of primary denotation is only the beginning of a much longer process of
exploring meaning, for each verse is embedded in a sequence, or rather a set of
interlocking sequences that make up the book as a whole, and it is never enough
to make do with the singular momentary flash of illumination that a single poem
provides. Like all the great prabandha texts of the sixteenth century—not only in
Telugu but also in Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, not to mention the Sanskrit
works produced concurrently with these—the VC imparts a powerful sense of
integrated composition. We need to ask about the particular form such
integration takes in this particular work.
Velcheru Narayana Rao has said that connoisseurs of Telugu poetry come
in two discrete parties; there are the partisans of Pĕddana and his close
1
contemporaries and the aficionados of Bha umūrti. One can see why this wouldṭṭ
be the case. Pĕddana’s Manu-caritramu flows along a compelling narrative
channel, capacious enough to allow for many long lyrical passages. Despite, or
perhaps because of, its elevated diction and style, the Manu-caritramu is an
immensely readable work, quite unlike the textures of the VC that I have just
described. One could say the same for Mukku Timmana’s Pārijātāpahara amuṇ
and, on another plane entirely, for Pi ga i Sūranna’s ṅ ḷ Ka āpūr odayamu ḷ ṇ and
Prabhāvatī-pradyumnamu as well as for Dhūrja i’s ṭ Kā ahastīśvara-māhātmyamuḷ .
It would be a mistake to undervalue the narrative force of these major works; the
story exists as an autonomous force that provides coherence, fascination, and
thematic consistency. In the VC, by way of contrast, the story, though a critical
component of the text as a whole, chugs along like the Śuktimatī River blocked by
rocks, heavy boulders, and, ultimately, by the Kolāhala Mountain (see below).
The obstacles are the verses that tell this story and that divert the reader’s
attention to a recurring set of themes, linguistic practices or, perhaps,
obsessions. Complexity informs these themes and practices and has its own
aesthetic force. We need to imagine an audience capable of finding pleasure in
complexity of this order.
It seems clear that the VC marks a later stage in the literary experiment
that sixteenth-century Telugu poets were engaged in—a stage that, incidentally,
follows upon the destruction of the Vijayanagaram capital in 1565 and that
unfolded primarily in the southern reaches of the Telugu world, in Rāyalasīma,
where Bha umūrti, Tenāli Rāmak a, Dhūrja i, and Sūranna were living andṭṭ ṛṣṇ ṭ
working in the relevant decades alongside the master sculptors and architects
who produced the great Rāyalasīma temples (in Tadipatri, Lepaksi, Srisailam,
2
and elsewhere) that, in their own way, share the aesthetic stance of these poets.
A Rāyalasīma sensibility infuses these masterpieces and awaits definition. The
VC is, perhaps, its finest literary expression. “Complexity” is too crude a rubric to
make sense of what is going on in this series.
It is common to read in modern Telugu essays on the VC that this book is
musical to an extraordinary degree-- that the phonoaesthetic and rhythmic
effects of many famous verses (such as 1.125, lalanājanāpā gaṅ …) overshadow
the verbal semantics of these poems. Such a statement is even true, as far as it
goes. It misses, however, the deeper poetic mechanisms that give the VC its true
character and the fundamental tension that activates so many of its verses. There
is no doubt that the VC is absorbed in the sheer musicality of sound, as we can
see by a profusion of verses that refer directly to the crystallized rāga system
from the time of Kallinātha (at Vijayanagaram itself), and also by what we might
call musicological notions, or implicit theoretical statements, about how sound,
with or without accompanying words, works on the mind or the heart of a good
listener. These reflective statements are worth an essay that would align them to
the musicological texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the south.
There is much to be learned from such a study. But in this preliminary essay, I
want to suggest another way of thinking about the VC and its major expressive
drives. This text offers us a new mode of combining sound and sense, one that is,
however, not unrelated to similar experiments taking place in Tamil and
Malayalam—with their newly articulated grammars—in the sixteenth century.1
How do we know that with the VC we have entered a new stage in Telugu
poetry? For one thing, the later (seventeenth-century) cā uṭ tradition tells us so.
1 See Clare and Shulman, “Ta i/Da in in Tamil Literary History.”ṇṭ ṇḍ
3
A beloved verse from the VC was, so we are told, actually purchased by
Bha umūrti from the poet Mukku Timmana, “Timmana of the Nose,” whoseṭṭ
name is directly linked to this verse. By this time, as Narayana Rao has said, a
verse is a commodity to be sold and bought. Here is the famous poem:
lā nann’ ŏllad’ a añcu gandha-phalī bal kākam tapamb’ andi yo-ṭ
ā-nāsāk ti tālci sarva-sumanas-saurabhya-sa vāsiyaiṣ ṛ ṃ
pūnĕn prek a a-mālikā-madhukarī-puñjambul ir-va kalanṣ ṇ ṅ (2.46)
In agony, the campaka blossom wondered
why bees seek the honey of so many flowers
but never come to her.
She fled to the forest to do penance.
As a reward, she achieved the shape of a woman’s nose.
Now she takes in the perfumes
of all the flowers, and on both sides
she is honored by eyes
black as bees.2
Bha umūrti supposedly liked this verse enough to want to insert it in a passageṭṭ
that marks an extraordinary tour de force in both narrative and poetic
playfulness—the moment just preceding the hero Vasu’s first direct glimpse of
his beloved Girikā and the poet’s concomitant attempt to provide a model of
2 Translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and D. Shulman, Classical Telugu Poetry, p. 178.
4
perception per se. We will examine this passage briefly in a moment. I suppose
one might claim that the cā uṭ story about this verse—which was in fact clearly
composed by Bha umūrti himself, who had no need to buy it from anyone else--ṭṭ
is derived from an accident, the striking “nosiness” of Timmana, who may well
have had a prominent nose, and its coincidental affinity with a poem seeking to
make sense of the poetic convention comparing a woman’s nose to the campaka
flower. But a closer look reveals typical features of the VC textuality, as we would
expect from a cā uṭ quotation meant to offer literary-critical comment: we have,
first of all, an assertion of intertextual interdependence of our text with that of
the Vijayanagaram poet Timmana and his time; and this intertextual basis for
understanding the poem is, in fact, a basic element in the overall structure of the
VC, which quotes directly and indirectly from Pĕddana, K arāya, the Sanskritṛṣṇ
Nai adhīyaṣ , and the synoptic model of Kālidāsa (for example, the final two
chapters of the VC, describing the wedding of Vasu and Girikā and its aftermath,
continuously remould the wedding passages in Kumāra-sambhava 7-8 and
Manu-caritramu 5). Both Flaubert and Walter Benjamin dreamt of producing a
book that was entirely made up of quotations; Bha umūrti has given us a workṭṭ
haunted in every major passage by its earlier intertexts.
Intertextuality as a formative principle is, however, only one piece of this
picture. It should never be seen as operating in a mechanical way. Each quotation
has its own peculiar force and meaning, and there is always a logic to its
insertion into the text at any given point. For now, please notice, keeping the
story of the poem’s origin in mind, that the emotional or cognitive coloring of this
verse is all about the campaka flower’s sense of rejection and neglect-- and about
the successful tactic the campaka adopts in order to overcome its misery and, in
5
effect, to take revenge on all its rivals. Technically, a poetic convention, kavi-
samaya, about the shape of the flower and a beautiful nose has been stretched,
examined, turned inside out, exposed as artificial and perhaps even ridiculous,
humanized, and then reinstated with the help of a standard figure, utprek āṣ
(informed by rūpaka): women’s eyes are to be seen as a kind of super-bee,
always present on either side of the nose, so the lucky and determined flower
has triumphed over its enemies (and another standard figure, vyatireka,
“surpassing,” comes into play). Sanskrit poetics provides us with a vocabulary for
analyzing these poetic moves that, nonetheless, cannot be reduced to the useful
categorical terms the śāstra offers. Incidentally, the textbook on poetics that is
attributed to Bha umūrti under the patronage of Narasa, the nephew of Aliyaṭṭ
Rāmarāja, the Kāvyāla kāra-sa grahamuṅ ṅ ,3 despite its rather traditional topical
format, clearly shows an awareness of the principle just stated: the aesthetic
force of a literary work exceeds the sum of its analytical components, including
figuration itself.4
This kind of analysis, based on the well-known figurative categories, can
even be misleading. We might rather say, abstracting and extrapolating from the
laconic cā uṭ story about noses, that Bha umūrti has here 1) taken off fromṭṭ
earlier intertexts that are incorporated and radically extended in his hands 2)
used the available tools of figuration to suggest the reality of fierce competition,
despair, and ultimate triumph over one’s (poetic) competitors 3) reflectively
dissected a configured syntagma based on poetic convention, revealing its limits,
thus undermining its natural meaningfulness 4) reconstituted the underlying
idea in a new syntactic form that preserves and reveals the subtle process just
3 The attribution is controversial and cannot be taken as established. 4 See the introductory verses, especially 20-26.
6
described. Even more simply, poetic language itself has been exposed, stretched
to its limit, broken open, examined, and put back together in a new form. All this
takes place on the level of a single, fairly straightforward verse, but we see such
methods at work almost everywhere in this book. I think the seemingly slight
seventeenth-century comment on a sixteenth-century masterpiece is remarkably
insightful, as is usually the case with this form of literary commentary.
2.
Before going any farther, we had best spend a moment with the narrative
that ostensibly serves the VC as its scaffolding. There is a mountain, Kolāhala, in
today’s Madhya Pradesh, south of Bundelkhand. He—the mountain is said already in
the Mahābhārata to be a sentient being, cetanā-yukta—was the son of the Himālaya
and thus a brother to Pārvatī. The MBh also tells us, in a concise vignette, that he fell
in love with the Śuktimatī river and impregnated her with twins.5 One of these twins
was Girikā, who became, in complicated ways, the mother of the Bhārata line of
heroes. Thus we have a tale of origins, not entirely unlike the story of Manu that
Allasāni Pĕddana chose for his great text. And like the Manu story, the story of Girikā
and Vasu Uparicara, “the aviator,”6 proceeds via rich affective complexities that are
clearly integral to the very idea of generating human beings. In our case, King Vasu
Uparicara kicked the mountain with his big toe and thus removed it from the path of
the river.7 This same king, known for having first established the annual New Year’s
festival for Indra, fell in love with Girikā and married her. This story is one of the
traditional starting points for the epic and, possibly for that very reason, was selected
5 MBh, Southern Recension 1.53.50-52.6 Vasu received this title when Indra gave him a crystal chariot that could fly through the sky.7 Ibid.
7
by Bhaṭṭumūrti when his patron summoned him and asked him to produce a kṛti that
would narrate an ancient story of royal deeds in a newly imagined and embellished
way (1.19, a well-known metapoetic verse within the introduction to the text).
Within the structure of this story, the VC is a book about nature and the natural
world as conceived, in a strong departure from earlier notions, in the sixteenth
century. It is also, of course, a book about love—that of a mountain for a river, at first,
but then primarily that of Vasu and Girikā. The unfolding of this love reveals further
themes to which we will return.
Take a moment to listen to the way Mount Kolāhala seeks to win the river’s
heart, and how she responds. This passage, in Canto 2, is one of the simpler narrative
segments of the book, thus an easy way into it; but it, too, like all the rest of the
verses, is saturated with bitextual (śliṣṭa) passages that reflect the compounded nature
of reality and the complex mechanisms by which human beings perceive it. Here is
the opening of Kolāhala’s speech, describing the moment he first caught sight of
Śuktimatī on a visit to Brahmā’s court:
“I saw you when you were leaving
after bowing to the god, you and all the other
lovely rivers—saw your limpid way of being,
your good taste, your depth, the way you contain
us all, your flowing fullness. Since that moment,
in my mind I can imagine
only you.” (2.125)
8
Each of the words he uses breaks into at least two semantic registers. The river has
acchāccha-bhāvambu, both a good heart or temperament and a limpid way of being;
sarasatvamu, good taste and the quality of being liquid;8 gambhīrata, both physical
and emotional depth; sarvaṅkaṣa-prauḍhi, the pervasiveness of water (sarva) as well
as the quality of holding or containing everything (also a third register: the fact of
being the ultimate touchstone); and, finally, paripūrṇatvamu, the fullness of heart or
mind and of a flooding river. It is also worth noting that the mountain mostly spends
his time imagining (here in the first-person: bhāvintun); I have argued elsewhere that
in the mental economy of sixteenth-century Telugu, bhāvanā is the defining faculty
around which all other mental functions are organized.
Kolāhala describes, in such doubled language, his passion, his suffering, and
his belief that only the river can heal him. At no point does he relinquish the useful
śleṣa layering of thought and image. Since I have dealt with this passage at length
elsewhere,9 we can, I think, move on to other aspects of the text and to a few striking
verses that exemplify these elements. But I want to repeat: this passage is atypically
simple to read. Once Vasu begins to fall in love with the young Girikā, and once he
sees her with his own eyes, the poetry becomes dense, deep, turned inward, often
scrambled, thus demanding a particular kind of concentrated attention (Śuktimatī has
an apt term for this poetic register, dhvani-garima, “weightiness of speech”).
What Bhaṭṭumūrti has added to the inherited narrative scaffolding has to do
with the post-Kolāhala generation: Vasu’s tantalizing vision of his beloved, and hers
of him; their inevitable agony of impatient and thwarted desire, viraha, akin to
Varūthini’s dark night of longing in Manu-caritramu 3; then, at the very center point
of the book, Canto 4 (out of 6), a sandeśa or messenger episode, in which Girikā’s 8 Śrīnātha famously uses this word is his metapoetic characterization of good poetry: Bhīma-kha amuṇḍ 1. 9 Shulman, “Empirical Observation.”
9
girlfriend, Mañjuvāṇī, goes to King Vasu’s court to deliver a garland from his beloved
along with a wild verbal tirade, and to receive in exchange his ring as a gift for her
friend (shades of the Cloud Messenger, radically reconceived); and finally, the two
long cantos describing in overwhelming detail the wedding of the two lovers and the
consummation of their passion. One might even go so far as to describe the entire VC,
from a compositional standpoint, as a massive sandeśa-kāvya, very close in its motifs
and probably in its origin to the contemporaneous Tamil genre of tūtu, that is then
encircled or thickened by the layers of plot preceding and succeeding this moment of
delivering the message that encapsulates the book’s expressive drive. But no one, I
think, reads the VC in order to find out what happens next.
3.
An excursus: whatever else the VC offers us, it most certainly aims at
articulating a theory—or perhaps several competing theories—of human perception.
Moreover, this thematic focus is fundamental to the wider set of topics and their
related poetic devices that we find throughout the work. Why, we might ask, is
perception so important? A partial answer is ready at hand from our discussion above.
There is something about human language that allows perception to take place at any
given moment and that shapes that perceptual process. What we see or hear or touch,
like what we think, is informed by language in both its figurative and its sheer
rhythmic or musical modes. We know this theme well from Piṅgaḷi Sūranna’s
Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, a heavily discursive reorganization, from a generation after
Bhaṭṭumūrti, of the implicit assumptions we find at work in the VC. The latter,
however, need to be seen in their own setting. Note that by insisting on the linguistic
drive intrinsic to all forms of perception, Bhaṭṭumūrti has produced, in effect, a
10
radically new form of naturalistic description, svabhāvokti, which I see as the
dominant figure or ornament of the entire text. Given the thick encrustation of such
descriptions in paronomastic and other compounded figurative moves, this conclusion
comes as something of a surprise.
Let us briefly consider what happens, according to the poet, when King Vasu
sees Girikā for the first time. Note that this moment of initial seeing— the first
impression and its articulation in figurative language—is clearly understood as
critical, as was the case with Kolāhala and Śuktimatī.
His two eyes were full of desire.
More than the two eyes, his mind
was full of desire in a very strange way.10
Even before his mind, his body was flooded: a wonder.
Even more than that change in body, hunger,
agitated and pressing, rushed in. (2.62)
Please notice the sequence and its retrograde movement: eyes to mind to body to
hungry desire. The eyes come first as the verse is stated; but the body precedes the
mind, and hunger or wish, īpsitamu, takes precedence over the body. Also, the very
fullness of vision is clearly a major element in the overflow or excess that the poet is
bringing to the surface: something has broken free.
As the king looked at that woman, he wanted never to blink (animeṣatvambu).
He succeeded in this by joyfully surrendering, with all his memories,11
10 aticitra-v ttiy aguṛ …leading into citramai at the end of the line.11 kānta-kānta-mukha-candrāsevanānanda-vāsanā, with vāsanā glossed here, as elsewhere in the VC, as sa skāraṃ . Bha umūrti has his own specialized lexicon.ṭṭ
11
to her moonlike face. Then he wanted to be king
of the unblinking gods, with a thousand eyes.
That’s how kings are. They’re unstable, always striving
for a higher station. (2.63)12
First lingering at her feet,
then rising to her thighs,
then reaching the zone of her belt,
his glance longed to climb up to the mountain bastion
of her breasts—which would have made him emperor
of the whole world. (2.64)13
Eagerly entering the tunnel of her navel,
grasping the ladder of her three folds of skin,
pulling himself up by the ropes that were the hairs
on her tummy, and finally conquering the high fortress
of her breasts: that’s how the king’s vision fulfilled
a soldier’s mission. Is there anything that can’t be achieved
by one who delights in battle? (1.65)
Both of the last two verses, embodying a physical ascent from feet to breasts, are
technically classed as a compounding of the figure samāsokti and śleṣa: the
superimposition of a multiform riddle onto a paronomastic blending of two or more 12 This verse should be read together with Pĕddana’s Manu-caritramu 2.33, where Varūthini loses her anime a-sthitiṣ , her divine failure to blink, upon seeing Pravara—another consequential first glimpse.13 cakra-śāsanonnata-sthānamu: Or, “of her breasts that have displaced the cakravāka birds.”
12
distinct registers (or vice versa). Each verse builds, bit by bit, a military metaphor,
making the king’s glance or vision, dṛṣṭi, a desperate and somewhat aggressive
invader of enemy territory. At the same time, the latent register defuses this
desperation: the cakra over which the king may someday rule is “really” the
cakravāka bird that conventionally serves as an upamāna for breasts. Notice that this
somewhat more innocent undertone inherent in the śleṣa makes for a mild irony that
reveals the playfulness of the figure. Most VC verses have this reflexive, ironic tone.
It’s as if the poet were saying, “Look how far I can push the figure—how outlandish
and even surreal I can make (or configure) it.” We have already seen this trajectory in
the verse on nosiness selected as exemplary by the cāṭu tradition.
“Reflexive” is one of our words, one we habitually, and unreflectively,
overwork. Let me find a simpler way to say what I mean. The poet immerses us in the
king’s intense perception; we repeatedly follow his eyes, or his glance, as the latter
moves from below to above, lingering over each beautiful body part. Because the
glance is driven by intensifying desire and its pleasures, we can speak, as the
commentators do, of cakṣuḥ-prīti, an overarching category in this passage. But the
true subject here is not the object of vision, namely Girikā, but the process of viewing
her: the glance is turned back on itself, so what we are seeing is the act of seeing
itself—seeing seen from within. This act turns out to be internally incongruous and
highly figurative. It is also, so we have seen, strange, a wonder, something utterly
different from everyday perception. The viewer is surprised by his vision, as the
reader is by his or hers (our glance is thus also turned back on itself, just like Vasu’s).
Apart from being unfamiliar, this vision is also defined as a flooding profusion of
sensory and cognitive elements—rasottuṅgamu…īpsitamu, 2.62—that have the
property of agitating and destabilizing the viewer’s mind. Intense perception like this
13
is inherently unstable, cañcala, like the ambitions of a politician-king. It is also
endowed with an urgent sense of reality, as lovers know. We could say that the
domain of what counts as real is reorganized in the light of the poet’s perception; or,
turning this equation around, what we perceive is what is real and must conform to the
way our seeing configures it.
Another element worth exploring is the irreducible singularity of the vision.
Girikā is beautiful in ways we might expect from having read Sanskrit and Telugu
poetry. But the poet keeps telling us how singular she is. The nuts and bolts of
linguistic figuration generate a set of shifting vantage points converging on an
“object” that is incomparable. Naturalistic description in the VC is usually of this sort
—thus very different from Kṛṣṇarāya’s svabhāvokti verses, or the hunting scene in
Manu-caritramu IV. In the VC, the entire visual field is extended, distended, and
repeatedly examined along with the space that is occupied by the act of seeing itself.
In fact, the latter impacts upon, indeed structures and moulds, whatever is seen. In this
poetic world, objectivity is what is achieved through the process of impinging upon
and re-conceiving what is there to be seen.
I have so far said almost nothing about the linguistic, or grammatical,
counterpart to this emergent model of perception. So let us read a few more verses:
His glance fell upon her face, like a wild garden,
with the fragrant tilaka mark on her forehead
(or was he seeing dark tilaka trees?),
then it slipped from her cheeks that were glossy
with the fresh honey of her smile
and slipped again, over and over, as if seeking a footing
14
on smooth moonstones, until, desperate,
it found the vines of her long, thick hair
and held on for dear life. (2.66)
Notice that the direction of movement has shifted: now we are moving, with the
king’s eye and his overheated mind, from top downwards.
Once more, that royal glance:
it turned her feet into fresh buds,
revealed her thighs, like the stem of the banana plant,
as the site of all happy beginnings,
showed an elephant’s back in her buttocks,
caused her non-existent waist to merge with the sky
and her breasts to touch the mountain peaks,
drew the conch, one of the nine treasures, on her neck,
let him find whatever fruit he desired in her sweet lips,
disclosed the shape of the syllable Śrī in her ears,
transformed her lovely face so that it could rule over the moon
(and all other kings), and as for her dark curls—
they were rainclouds, or any other rich
wondrous thing. (2.67)
He was a king all right, even the best of them all,
but he was drowning in dense wonder,
an ocean of driving passion where all
15
was one, beyond word or mind.14
He praised her beauty deep in his heart
that now depended on no
other object. (2.68)
I’d recommend that you keep in memory, at least till the end of this essay, that “ocean
of driving passion where all was one, beyond word or mind.” Now comes a typical
metalinguistic verse (2.69), which demands or perhaps allows only for prose
translation:
Her dark curls, which we call bhramaraka, have given bees their name (bhramaraka)
and helped them proliferate. Her face, which menaces the lotus, justifies the title we
give the moon: san-mitruḍu, “a true friend” (also: friend of the stars). If people call
the dŏṇḍa fruit bimba, that’s because it’s a pale reflection (bimba) of her sweet lips.
Her breasts are golden mountains, which is why people affectionately call mountains
gotra— (their) “relatives.” Necklaces are so similar to her arms that they are called
sarulu, “equals.” Wheels, being round, are “cakra”—that is, an army subservient to
her buttocks. Do you know why lotuses are called “younger brothers,” tammulu? It’s
because they were born as the younger siblings of her feet. As for flowers, named
prasavamulu, “pupils”—that’s because they learned to be flowers by studying her
fingernails.
Top-down movement again, but this time tied to an etymologizing effort worthy of
Plato’s Cratylus: each of the standard objects of comparison, upamānas, received its 14 vā -manasa-gocaretarādvaita-rāga-jaladhiṅ .
16
name, and possibly its very existence, from the subject (upameya) routinely compared
to it. This verse belongs to a wider set of figurative etymologies (see 1.107,
beautifully explaining the name kalpa-vṛkṣa), some of which reverse the direction of
the historical derivations we, like the Sanskrit grammarians, would normally prefer
(why are curls called bhramarakas if not because they mimic the bees?) The
upameyas have an ontological priority to their upamānas: the former were there first,
while the latter live a demoted, derivative existence, entirely dependent on these
surpassing—and, again, singular, incomparable—embodiments of beauty. Not only
do the upameyas precede, and effectively create, the standards of comparison that
somehow imitate them; they have also generated names and meaningful synonyms for
each upamāna, thus spilling over into language itself, at least in its nominal
categories. Technically, the master trope is kāvya-liṅga, “causal sign,” as the
commentators note; but because of the superior existential status of Girikā’s limbs and
organs, we also have an implicit vyatireka, “excelling, exceeding,” as well as
hetūtprekṣā, an explanatory flight of fancy. Note, however, that these three figures are
not simply compounded in the cumulative way that we see everywhere in kāvya.
Something much more powerful—a second-order or even third-order reflection on
figuration, indeed, on language itself—is built into this mode of articulating the poet’s
thought. In fact, once again, the standard form of figurative analysis that the alaṅkāra-
śāstra offers us is simply not adequate to making sense of such a verse.
The poet is playing with us; he ostensibly gives us a glimpse into the rather
wild thoughts racing through Vasu’s mind (presumably the king has read quite a lot of
Sanskrit and Telugu poetry and sees the world through the creative logic active in the
tropes). How seriously are we meant to take this set of interlacing configured or
enfigured perceptions? It’s not, after all, a Platonic dialogue. But I think the answer to
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the question is: seriously enough, because it is a form of play. We might try to come
to terms with the notion that language, and especially language on the lips of a great
poet, has no accidental, non-iconic, inorganic relations among its parts. Words mean
what they say not by convention-- though the notion of a conventionalized metaphoric
usage, rūḍhi, is present somewhere in the background to this verse-- but by an integral
meaningfulness that inheres in the sonic patterns of the syllables and can be rationally
paraphrased. A name or epithet or even synonym carries a non-random and causally
effective semantic burden, as Patañjali already tells us in the introduction to the
Mahābhāṣya. The Telugu poet has taken this principle to its playful, imaginative
limit, in effect privileging sound over abstract meaning in so far as sound turns into,
or animates, a name.
It is, in fact, doubtful if such a crafted verse contains anything random at all, at
any level of analysis. What is more, Girikā is a child of nature, prakṛti-putrika; it is
thus only natural that nature, a living and rule-bound domain, should have necessary
links with the natural potentiality of language, links that emerge from and remain
intimately linked to such a person, the subject of the poem and the object of the hero’s
racing mind.
He can’t stop. Or Bhaṭṭumūrti can’t stop. The exploration of the king’s
perceptual overload, studied from many vantage points, repeatedly transfigured,
continues for another five verses. Here is one last example.
Darkness had a problem. The girl’s face
had defeated his enemy, the moon,
using her eyebrows as its bow, and her glances
as arrows. Her smile stole the ambrosia,
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her gleaming cheeks took the radiance,
her forehead the moon’s slim slices
of loveliness. And Darkness saw it all.
Still afraid, even more frightened,
he took refuge in her full black hair. (1.70)
4.
To approach a formulation of the poetic effects inherent in any deep reading of
this work, we have to look more closely at one or two verses from other parts of the
VC. In theory, a principle of metonymic consonance should operate between
individual verses and the larger whole. Let’s see where this takes us. In the final
section of this paper, I will propose a general, if tentative, protocol of reading perhaps
relevant to this book as an integrated poetic work.
We saw what happens to Vasu when he sees Girikā directly for the first time.
What happens to him, and to his vision, when she shyly retreats behind a curtain of
vines? This happens only halfway through the next canto, in verse 3.75:
touching her, and the twisted vines of the forest15 v.l. rasa-
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that might have blocked his vision
failed to do so for they were swaying
unsteadily in a gathering breeze
raised by the feathers of peacocks
who started dancing when they caught sight
of what they took to be dark rainclouds
that were, in fact, her long dark hair.
Like so many verses in this text, this one is a marvel of iconic precision on the level
of sound as generating meaning: the unsteady swinging of the vines is heard before it
is deciphered as meaningful words. In particular, one hears the mellifluous swish of
labials, liquids and nasals, including (in lines 3 and 4) dental stops that have been
turned into nasals and the liquid l because of sandhi rules (milat > milan, and the
near-rhyme unmīlat > unmīlan, also marut > marul). The reader is invited to recite the
verse in Telugu to herself, preferably several times. We could also spend time on the
impressive Sanskrit compound that spills over from line 3 and comprises all of line 4
—a spectacular crescendo. Then there is the inevitable figure, bhrāntimat, that
suddenly turns up inside this compound and lifts the statement to a more complex
cognitive level. The peacocks mistake Girikā’s hair for monsoon clouds and start
dancing, and the sweep of their tail feathers generates a wind, getting stronger by the
second, that moves the vines in such a way that the king still can see something of his
hidden beloved. We might paraphrase the progression in his mind, and therefore in
the reader’s mind, as a strong tension between concealing and revealing, the latter
eventually winning out over the former—though the two processes are apparently
logically, even existentially, twined together and should also, no doubt, be read as
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describing what happens inside a good poem. Now ask yourself what it is that is being
concealed and what is revealed. I am reluctant to spell it out. In any case, we find
ourselves studying a pregnant relation between the natural, partly humanized world
outside and the human beings active within that world.
Another way to speak about this verse, precisely paralleling the tension just
described, is in terms of overdetermined meaningfulness in relation to semantic
(verbal) underdetermination. Interestingly, the sound patterns are, it seems,
overdetermined in relation to their rather flat verbal counterparts—the sheer music
taking precedence over deciphered meaning. But can a verbal semantics really be
impoverished in an urbane, hyper-semanticized text like this? Generally speaking, as
we have already seen, the bitextual verses, so prevalent in the VC, are charged with
overlapping meanings, perhaps too many of them. They set off a dizzy oscillation in
the reader’s mind, not unlike what happens when the vines are made to dance by the
wind. But it now seems that such verses cannot be understood simply by deciphering
their parallel or overlapping semantic tracks. In fact, the very act of decoding runs
contrary to the rhythmic and phonoaesthetic patterns that Telugu scholars always
praise in this text. So perhaps we need to posit a certain space that is opened up by
two contrary poetic processes, that is, by the dense interaction of layered verbal
utterance and the hyposemantic, yet overdetermined, musical sounds. The VC creates
and inhabits such a space, and the recurrent surprise the reader feels has to do with
something new that happens when she enters this intimate domain, “almost touching,”
as the poem says, whatever the poem describes.
That newness should interest us, as it did Bhaṭṭumūrti in his putative work on
poetics (1.21, where he speaks of abhinavāndhra-kavita). We might be able to define
it. It supersedes what I am tempted to call the “mad figuration” that the poet brings to
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verse after verse. He can’t do without these compounded figures, but usually they are
twisted back onto or into the listener, revealing something of what is going on in her
mind. The peacocks make a mistake that triggers a larger misperception happening
elsewhere, as if outside the poem. Note the nonchalant, deceptive ease with which
bhrānti misperception slips into the verse and provides a causal explanation binding
together the pieces of the naturalistic tableau: woman, man, vines, peacocks, wind,
and the driving vision that connects them.
I want to suggest that we are observing a strange, sometimes surreal form of
realism, at once empirical, accessible to formulation, deeply configured, and infused
by both the sound patterns and the cumulating meanings that tend to collide in
intensified language. I’ll come back to this point. To see the difference from earlier
poets, with whose work Bhaṭṭumūrti is deeply engaged, it may suffice to listen to a
verse from the Manu-caritramu such as the following, from a similar moment of deep
seeing (Varūthini vis-à-vis Pravara):
She saw him. Stood up
and walked toward him, the music
of her anklets marking the rhythm,
her breasts, her hair, her delicate waist
trembling. Stood by a smooth areca tree
as waves of light from her eyes
flooded the path that he was walking. (2.29)
We have the same richness of mellifluous and iconic sound, but what about a poetic
figure or two, preferably threaded together? Maybe the last two lines could be seen as
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an utprekṣā, except for the fact that light from the eye is thought to be a fully
objectified physical force quite capable of literally flooding, in waves, whatever is
being seen. But it is superfluous to spend time classifying when we have a verse like
this, so immediately intelligible, charming, even ravishing to the ear—and so realistic
in its own way, also far more direct in this respect than the VC poem we were
examining. Of course Pĕddana, and even more strikingly, Kṛṣṇarāya, also give us
verses of astonishing complexity, scrambled syntax, and the meta-poetic or meta-
linguistic techniques that hypertrophy in the VC. Bhaṭṭumūrti did not invent them. He
has, however, done something consistently different and new with these materials, as
I think most readers intuitively recognize. Among other elements, the necessary
presence of overlapping meanings in the śliṣṭa verses suggests, time after time, a new
point of departure for both listener and author, who find themselves in an
unanticipated and surprisingly elastic space. Overlapping, itself—what Carnatic
musicians and musicologists call vivāda—is a technique designed to allow for just
such a new departure through imaginative projection, where the known and the
unknown meet in unexpected ways.16
One more example and I will stop. Girikā has barely survived her extended
viraha moment. Her girl friends are at a loss to help her. She’s severely overheated,
indeed on fire, and the standard methods won’t work. All this is familiar. But at the
culminating moment in this passage, the poet produces a verse (3.180) that, according
to Viswanatha Satyanarayana, undoubtedly one of the finest readers of such works, is
without parallel in all of Telugu literature.17 The girl friends are speaking; an English
paraphrase, rather than a translation, follows:
16 I thank T. M. Krishna for his insightful analysis of musical rāga and Don Handelman for helpful discussions of vivāda.17 Introduction to the Emesko edition, p. 28.
Shulman, David. “Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music: The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis.” Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, J. Gonda Lecture, 2013.
Shulman, David. “Empirical Observation and Embodied Nature in Sixteenth-century South India.” In Susan Neiman, Peter Galison & Wendy Doniger (eds.), What Reason Promises: Essays on Reason, Nature and History. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.